Management of business and personal contact information is a vital part of every business-person's life. People and businesses have not only a desire, but a need to stay in touch. Our contact information changes faster than ever before, making it exceedingly difficult for our contacts to keep in touch with us. So, while communication has never been easier, staying in touch has never been more difficult. There currently exists a significant market for manufacturers, developers and retailers of software and electronic hardware products that manage personal and business contact information. Anyone who uses email, instant messaging, a cellular/wireless phone, a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), PIM (Personal Information Manager) a fax machine or a telephone with a speed dial feature (for convenience we label all of these types of applications and devices “digital address books” or “client computers” on a client/server computer network) knows the frustration of entering and maintaining accurate and complete information in these devices. Studies indicate that in excess of 30% of the records in a typical digital address book are inaccurate within 12 months.
There exists therefore, a substantial need for a system to reduce or eliminate the labor and errors associated with the entry and maintenance of contact-related information into a digital address book. This system provides a method to substantially reduce if not eliminate, for the user of the invention, the labor and errors associated with manual data entry and maintenance of contact information into a digital address book.
Systems to facilitate updating of digital address books have been developed that require both parties, both the sender of an update request and the addressee, to be “members” of a service provided on a server. There exists a need for a service where only the sender is a member of the service and the update requests can be directed to anyone, particularly any digital address book that acts as a client computer on a computer network accessible to the server. This system fills that need. The sender needs to be a “member” only to receive the software that extracts the entries from the address book, allows the sender to draft messages, attaches the messages to particular email addresses, processes the responses, and updates the address book. A benefit of this approach is that it makes it easy and desirable for users to promote use of the system to their contacts. The prior art systems facilitate the user sending invitations to join the system, but recipients must join before either the sender or recipient can benefit. With this system, both parties receive immediate benefit from the system even if only one party is a “member”.